As many as one billion people could lose their homes by 2050 because of the devastating impact of global warming, scientists and political leaders will be warned today. They will hear that the steady rise in temperatures across the planet could trigger mass migration on unprecedented levels.The Independent, 29/4/08

“If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late,” said Rajendra Pachauri, a scientist and economist who heads the IPCC. “What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.” He said that since the IPCC began its work five years ago, scientists have recorded “much stronger trends in climate change,” such as a recent melting of polar ice that had not been predicted. “That means you better start with intervention much earlier.”New York Times 17 Nov 2007

Dismissing the possibility of a Republican win in November,(former Senator) Wirth called a second Obama administration term “the last window of opportunity” to enact policies that can avert a catastrophic rise in global temperatures. “It’s the last chance we have to get anything approaching 2 degrees Centigrade,” he said. “If we don’t do it now, we are committing the world to a drastically different place.”Climate progress, 23 Dec 2011

Barack Obama has only four years to save the world. That is the stark assessment of Nasa scientist and leading climate expert Jim Hansen who last week warned only urgent action by the new president could halt the devastating climate change that now threatens Earth. Crucially, that action will have to be taken within Obama’s first administration, he added.The Guardian, 18 Jan 2009

More than 100 million people will die and global economic growth will be cut by 3.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2030 if the world fails to tackle climate change, a report commissioned by 20 governments said on Wednesday.

As global average temperatures rise due to greenhouse gas emissions, the effects on the planet, such as melting ice caps, extreme weather, drought and rising sea levels, will threaten populations and livelihoods, said the report conducted by humanitarian organisation DARA.Reuters, 25 Sep 2012

The 14 scientists, all experts in their fields of climate research, were asked about the probability of a tipping point being reached some time before 2200 if global warming continued on the course of the worst-case scenarios predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Nine of the fourteen scientists said that the chances of a tipping point for the high scenario were greater than 90 per cent, with only one saying that the chances were less than 50:50. At current rates of CO2 emissions, the world is on course for following the higher trajectory on global warming suggested by the IPCC.

The survey, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was carried out by a team led by Granger Morgan of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to try to assess the level of consensus among climate scientists over some of the uncertainties about future predictions.The Independent, 28 Jun 2010

“During Earth Hour 2008, we created community. Not just a virtual community but a real sense of how many people behind curtains in homes for blocks around felt the same. That community needs to make a commitment this Earth Hour to deeper resolve and action. The countdown to reverse dangerous trends has begun. Before Earth Hour 2010, one year from now, we must have turned the corner. Time is not on our side.” Elizabeth E. May, O.C., is leader of the Greens in Canada. The Star 24 Mar 2009

Antarctica is likely to be the world’s only habitable continent by the end of this century if global warming remains unchecked, the Government’s chief scientist, Professor Sir David King, said last week. He said the Earth was entering the “first hot period” for 60 million years, when there was no ice on the planet and “the rest of the globe could not sustain human life”.The Independent, 2 May 2004

The world has already passed the point of no return for climate change, and civilisation as we know it is now unlikely to survive, according to James Lovelock, the scientist and green guru who conceived the idea of Gaia – the Earth which keeps itself fit for life. The world and human society face disaster to a worse extent, and on a faster timescale, than almost anybody realises, he believes.

He writes: ” Before this century is over, billions of us will die, and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”Countercurrents, 20 Jan 2006

A scientific model has suggested that society will collapse in less than three decades due to catastrophic food shortages if policies do not change.

Dr Aled Jones, the Director of the Global Sustainability Institute, told Insurge Intelligence: “We ran the model forward to the year 2040, along a business-as-usual trajectory based on ‘do-nothing’ trends — that is, without any feedback loops that would change the underlying trend.”

“The results show that based on plausible climate trends, and a total failure to change course, the global food supply system would face catastrophic losses, and an unprecedented epidemic of food riots.”

Perhaps as early as 2050 human habitation will be becoming difficult across central America, southern Europe, north Africa, southern Asia and Japan as well as southern Africa, the Pacific islands, and most of Australia and Chile. Only the far north and south of the planet will remain wet enough to allow large scale human settlement and agriculture.The Telegraph (UK), 26/2/09

The other option is that no controls are imposed on burning fossil fuels, and the carbon bubble does not burst until the warming breaks through the two-degree limit and triggers the natural feedbacks that will carry us inexorably up to +6 degrees C. That implies mass death and possibly civilizational collapse by the end of the century, but the fossil fuel reserves will retain their assumed value for the meantime and there will be no financial crash.Gwynne Dyer: The third option on global warming, 28 Apr 2013

This methane eruption data is so consistent and aerially extensive that when combined with methane gas warming potentials, Permian extinction event temperatures and methane lifetime data it paints a frightening picture of the beginning of the now uncontrollable global warming induced destabilization of the subsea Arctic methane hydrates on the shelf and slope which started in late 2010.

Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters…A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.The Guardian 22 Feb 2004

A senior environmental official at the United Nations, Noel Brown, says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.San Jose Mercury News 30 Jun 1989

Tim Flannery, the well-known Australian environmentalist, was on CBC Radio the other day to issue more alarms about global warming. “It’s now or never,” he said. “We have about 20 years to address climate change or else our entire future is in jeopardy.” He painted an apocalyptic picture of drought, flooding, famine and war.The Globe and Mail, Oct. 14 2009.

Professor Peter Barrett, Director of Victoria, NZ University’s Antarctic Research Centre, repeated his published warning that extinction of humankind and human society as we know it may come about within 100 years because of impending climate change and ecological catastrophe – unless humankind can dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.live radio interview on December 20, 2004

“[By] 1995, the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots…[By 1996] The Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers.”Michael Oppenheimer, published in “Dead Heat,” St. Martin’s Press, 1990

The Climate Commission report says the world has at best 10 years to cut carbon emissions or it will face dangerous atmospheric warming and sea level rises. Professor Steffen also called today for an end to “fruitless, phoney” debate, saying climate change denial is a luxury the world can no longer afford.The Australian, 23 May 2011

“We have 500 days – not a day more – to avoid a climate disaster. We must face up to climate disruption, climate chaos. The scientists, several of whom are present here, have said it: ‘you’d have to be blind not to see it’” M. Laurent Fabius, Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Development, 14 May 2014 about France hosting the major climate conference in December 2015.ambafrance-us.org

On July 5, 1989, Noel Brown, then the director of the New York office of the United Nations Environment Program, warned of a “10-year window of opportunity to solve” global warming — “entire nations could be wiped off the face of Earth by rising sea levels if the global-warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ‘eco-refugees,’ threatening political chaos.”as reported in The Washington Times, 21 Apr 2014

The Prince of Wales is to issue a stark warning that nations have “less than 100 months to act” to save the planet from irreversible damage due to climate change. His warning will be delivered on Thursday in a keynote speech in Rio de Janeiro. In Thursday’s speech, the Prince will warn that a failure to act in the next eight years will have catastrophic effects for the planet.www.telegraph.co.uk, 07 Mar 2009

The planet has just five years to avoid disastrous global warming, says the Federal Government’s chief scientist. Prof Penny Sackett yesterday urged all Australians to reduce their carbon footprint. Australians – among the world’s biggest producers of carbon dioxide – were “better placed than others to do something about it”, she said.

The professor said even if all the world stopped producing carbon dioxide immediately, temperature increases of 1.3C were unavoidable. If the earth’s temperature rose 2C, she warned, there would be risks that were “difficult and dangerous”.Herald Sun, December 04, 2009

The next 50 years offer Sydney the last chance to avoid catastrophic climate change that would devastate south-eastern Australia, the scientist Tim Flannery has warned. Speaking last night at the State Government’s Sydney Futures forum, Dr Flannery warned of a city grappling with up to 60 per cent less water. As temperatures around the world warmed by 2 to 7 per cent Sydney could glimpse its future by looking at the devastating impact that global warming had already had on Perth, which he said was likely to become a “ghost metropolis”.Sydney Morning Herald 19 May 2004

The United States and the European Union agree that the next 15 years will be decisive in averting a global warming disaster but disagree on a strategy, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said Sunday. He said Washington and Europe concurred that “politicians have at most another 15 years to take steps to ensure that climate change does not become a catastrophe.”www.terradaily.com, 3 Jun 2007

The report said global emissions must peak by 2015 for the world to have any chance of limiting the expected temperature rise to 2C, which would still leave billions of people short of water by 2050.
The warning came in a report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published yesterday in Bangkok.www.theguardian.com, 5 May 2007

Srgjan Kerim, President of the General Assembly, opened the discussion by saying that 11 of the last 12 years had ranked among the 12 warmest since the keeping of global temperature records had begun in 1850. Two points were significant: that climate change was inherently a sustainable-development challenge; and that more efforts than ever before must be exerted to enable poor countries to prepare for impacts because it had been estimated that there would be between 50 million and 200 million environmental migrants by 2010.UN Press release, 8 Jul 2008

Mark Lynas draws on the latest science to describe the world under warming scenarios ranging from 1° (bad) to 6°C (unimaginably bad). He sums up the task with brutal candour: “we have only seven years left to peak global emissions before facing escalating dangers of runaway global warming.”review of Recent Books about Climate Change, By Clive Hamilton, http://www.themonthly.com.au October 2008